Florence banks on connecting nursing homes to self-employed nurses

by Startacus Admin

Florence - a marketplace for nurses to find shifts in hospitals and nursing homes and vice-versa, empowers care homes and nurses to connect via an online platform that dramatically reduces the cost of recruitment for the homes whilst helping nurses book higher paying shifts online.

Pain Point - The UK healthcare system is endemically short of staff and often reliant on recruitment agencies that provide headcount, but often at highly inflated costs, with varying levels of service and quality.

Step forward Dr Charles Armitage, who after quickly identifying this pain-point, came up with what he hopes is a painkiller of a solution in Florence, a platform that connects healthcare professionals directly to local jobs.

Florence, born after small amount of investment from friends and family, deskspace in London’s tech community, and a year of extensive research, has to date, registered 6000 nurses and begun working with 70 care homes across the South East and North West of England.

Florence have now just released a new tool that supplements their core offering of matching nurses to shifts, offering nursing home providers an improved allocation of their own staff between their homes. With this tool, nursing home managers will be able to fill their shift vacancies with their own staff and aim to avoid using nursing agencies. This dramatically reduces staffing costs (20-30%), improves staff engagement and ultimately continuity of care.

And, if those nursing home managers can't fill these shifts internally - well one would imagine Florence will still be on hand 24-hours-a-day to offer that much needed headcount. Bingo.

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